


the longest seventeen hours of steve rogers's life

by starspngledman



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Road Trip, this is during civil war so if you haven't seen civil war Keep Out™
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 22:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7125562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starspngledman/pseuds/starspngledman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Have you ever wondered what went on during the seventeen hours Sam, Steve, and Bucky were in that tiny Volkswagen? Hint: a whole lot of bickering, necessary McDonald's stops, and childish car games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the longest seventeen hours of steve rogers's life

**Author's Note:**

> i saw a post on tumblr a while back about how these three had to spend 17 HOURS in a car together on their way from bucharest to berlin and all i could think was 'shenanigans' so here u go enjoy  
> p.s. this says there's no pairing but i weaseled some implied stevebucky in there woops my b

**corbii mari, romania: hour zero**

This wasn't exactly what Steve Rogers liked to do for fun.  
A seventeen-hour road trip through six countries, packed into a vintage Volkswagen Bug with his best-friend-turned-beefy-Russian-assassin and a guy who’s used to tearing up the sky?  
 _Yeah, sign me the hell up._  
But they had to be nondescript, and a vintage Volkswagen Bug was about as nondescript as he could manage in Eastern Europe.  
"So...should we...turn on some music, maybe?" Sam shifts uncomfortably in his seat; the silence that had consumed the car for the forty-five minutes since they'd left Bucharest was obviously starting to get to him. I mean, how could it not? Steve he could be himself with, but his friend, the Russian one, the one they -- and the rest of the God damn world, apparently -- had been searching for for years now, he made him uneasy. The question was directed at Steve.  
Steve glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, then in the rear-view mirror at Bucky, where the two locked eyes. Buck had himself sprawled out in the backseat, his head resting against the passenger-side window. Steve heaved a heavy sigh before gesturing to the backseat – he’d noticed a few cassette tapes strewn on the floor back there.  
“Not quite sure what century they’re from, though,” he says. Bucky smiles at that.  
“Perfect for us, then, huh, Stevie?”  
Steve catches his eye in the mirror again and they share shit-eating grins. Sam rolls his eyes. He picks out a cassette from the pile he’d hauled into his lap, whisper-shouting, “YES.” It was obvious this was a band that he knew. Steve looked sideways at Sam, silently reading the cassette’s label.  
“What’s an A-B-B-A?”  
“ABBA, dude! _Mamma Mia_? _Super Trouper_? No? Nothing? Add that to your list, man.”  
Steve laughed at the fact that Sam remembered his list. He still hadn’t seen _Star Wars_. That was something he’d discussed with Bucky earlier, actually. “Yeah, man, I went to the premiere of the first one, back in ’77. I mean, it was a mission, so I didn’t really get to watch much of it. We’ll watch them together. We will,” Bucky had said.  
“Well, I won’t have to add it to the list if you’d just shut up and pop the tape in,”  
Sam scoffs but does as he’s told, bobbing his head along to the opening to a disco pop song Steve _definitely_ would never have listened to unless he’d been made to _put it on his list_. He and Bucky share a glance in the rear-view mirror again, both of them thinking, _okay, yeah, not from this century, but not from our part of the last one_.  
 _Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight,_  
Won’t somebody help me  
Chase the shadows away…

**pitești, romania: hour two**

“Steve, talk some sense into him, please,” Sam yells out the backseat window; he and Bucky had decided they’d let Steve drive and that they’d share custody of the front seat. Or…well…Steve had decided that for them. The trio had stopped to gas up – rather, Steve had stopped to gas up; the other two had remained in the car while Steve (dressed in his usual don’t-look-at-me-I’m-just-a-pedestrian leather jacket and baseball cap he wore when he didn’t want to be noticed) used broken Romanian that Bucky had attempted to teach him in order to pay for a few litres of petrol to put in the car and to grab some candy from the counter. He threw said candy through the front window at Bucky, rolling his eyes. Steve felt like a dad taking his kids to the beach.  
“I leave for, what, three minutes? And you two are bickering already?” Steve starts pumping the gas he’d just paid for, propping a hand on his hip.  
“He won’t move his seat up,” Sam mutters, exaggerating just how little room he had in the backseat of the Volkswagen by shoving against the passenger seat in front of him. Bucky grunts, retaliating by using the lever on the side of the seat to move it into a laying-down position. Sam practically screeches, “Come _on!_ ”  
“Bucky, man, seriously?” Steve gives him a ‘disappointed dad’ look. He’s also seriously starting to question why he didn’t tie one of them up and let them ride in the trunk. _Hm…still time for that_.  
Bucky sniggers, taking his sweet time before moving his seat back to its original position, peeling open one of the candy bars and popping it into his mouth, Sam muttering an obscenity under his breath.  
Oh, my God, Steve didn’t think he could take much more of their bickering.

**szeged, hungary: hour eight**

“Hey, you two wanna play iSpy?”  
“What’s that?” Bucky asks, shifting himself to turn around and look Sam in the eyes.  
“You haven’t heard of…? Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So, it’s a game my family and I used to play, probably my parents’ way of keeping us occupied and from complaining. You just say what you see without actually saying what the object is, and everyone else has to guess it. So, for instance,” Sam pauses, glances out the window just as they’re passing a billboard with green lettering on it, “I spy something green.”  
“Man, everything out here is green,” Bucky groans. “Not quite sure how much I like this game.”  
“It was the billboard, you idiot.” Sam rolls his eyes. “Steve, you go.”  
Steve glances at him, then at Buck, then back at the road, grunting his reply. _Leave me out of this._  
“No wait, I want to play, I changed my mind,” says Bucky. “I spy something irritating.”  
Sam throws his hands up, folding them over his chest and turning to stare out the window.  
Bucky waits a second, before asking, “Did you get it yet?”  
Sam sucks on his teeth, shaking his head before turning to Steve. “You hearing this shit?”  
“I think you’d better answer the man, Sam,” Steve answers, thinking about how much this Bucky reminds him of the one he knew 100 years ago in Brooklyn. The little shit.  
“Wait, if he can’t get it, I’ll just tell him,” Bucky says with a grin on his face.  
“What? _What is it?_ ” Sam asks, humoring Steve, only Steve.  
“…It’s you.”  
The car jerks, almost off the road, as Steve tries to keep Sam from strangling Bucky.

**budapest, hungary: hour eleven**

The whole car is humming with anticipation as they pass a sign for the first McDonald’s they’ve seen since leaving Bucharest.  
“Oh, man, I am _starving_ ,” Sam groans.  
“We ate, like, four hours ago,” Steve says.  
“Yeah, candy bars, Steve. And it was more like seven hours.” Bucky has shifted himself so he’s leaning between the front seats. “…You think we can stop?”  
Steve nods towards the backseat, easing the car off the highway onto the exit ramp that will take them to fast-food paradise. “The only cash I have is back there with you.”  
Bucky pulls back, glances around, before finally noticing the wad of one and five dollar bills Steve has tucked neatly underneath the passenger seat. He has to hand it to him; that’s where Bucky would’ve stashed it, too. He counts the money in his hand out. “Okay…so…there’s twenty-two dollars here.”  
“Wait, that’s it?” Steve asks, momentarily turning to look at Bucky, then back at the money in his hand, then back at Bucky.  
“Yup, that’s it.”  
“God, I’m gonna need to get gas again before we get to Berlin, too.”  
“So…dollar menu?” Sam suggests.  
“Two hamburger limit each. And we’ll share a drink.”  
“Man, I’m not sharing a drink, I’m dying of thirst. I’ll just drink my own pee. Like in that James Franco movie,” Sam says.  
“Didn’t see that one?” Steve says, arching a brow. “You don’t need to _drink your own pee_ , Sam. We’ll get water bottles or something then, it’s fine.”  
Sam grunts his approval and leans back in his seat.  
Steve glances at Bucky in the rearview mirror, noticing, first and foremost, that his eyebrows are knitted together. “Bucky, you know what you want? What’s wrong man? You look like you just ate a lemon.”  
“Who’s James Franco? And why the hell did he have to drink his own pee?”

**keblice, czech republic: hour fifteen**

“Bucky, I let you talk me into letting you drive so that I could get some shut-eye, not have my skull smashed against the window,” Steve grumbles, rubbing the back of his head. He’d tried to fall asleep in the tiny front seat of the Bug, all of his long, sinewy limbs tucked up around and under himself. Emphasis on _tried_.  
Bucky mutters an apology, smirking over at Steve. It’d gotten dark sometime since Steve had fallen asleep, and also he really had to pee.  
“I have to pee.”  
“You want an empty coffee cup? Or maybe the McDonald’s cup? Oh, wait, that’s still got soda left in it,” Sam says, making exaggerated slurping noises as he hands the coffee cup to Steve.  
“What the-? Why can’t we just pull over and I can piss in the weeds next to the car?”  
“We’re on a highway, Steve,” Sam says, snickering, “you’ll get ticketed for public indecency.”  
“I’m Captain America, no one’s gonna give Captain America a ticket for public indecency.”  
“Yeah, Steve, but you’re a criminal now,” Bucky says, offering his unwanted two-cents. “You’ll get ticketed, trust me.”  
Steve rolls his eyes, then reaches back so Sam can hand him the cup. He shifts so that he can  
“Nothing I haven’t seen before, pal,” Bucky grunts, but makes a big show of squaring his shoulders and making sure Steve knows he’s paying attention to the road, and only the road. Steve can still make out the smirk on his face out of the corner of his eye, though. “Come on, you were in the military, you never peed in a cup before?”  
Sam nods, says, “Yeah, man, my unit, we all saw each other’s junk. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Especially for you.”  
Bucky holds his fist out to Sam. Sam bumps it with his own. The two chuckle.  
Steve lets out a groan that he hopes the guys decipher as, “I’m clearly mortified,” while he empties his bladder into the cup that once held mediocre-at-best gas station coffee. “Are we in Berlin yet?”

**berlin, germany: hour seventeen ******

“Not sure you understand the concept of a getaway car.” Steve looks up at Sharon as she steps from her (totally inconspicuous) black European vehicle.  
He smirks, shrugs. “It’s low-profile.”  
She laughs as they wander to the trunk of the car. Sharon opens it to show Steve that she has the gear that was taken from them in Bucharest. “Good, ‘cause this stuff tends to draw a crowd. Long trip?”  
“…You have no idea,” Steve mutters, turning back to look at the two in the Volkswagen, both Sam and Bucky bearing grim, exhausted smiles.  
“Can you move your seat up?” Bucky asks, probably just to bother Sam.  
“No,” Sam replies, remembering the petrol station in Pitești, bothered.  
Bucky smirks and shifts, like, four inches to his left. Steve shakes his head.  
 _Yeah, long trip._

**Author's Note:**

> okay so this is only my second-ever published fic so please be kind to me!  
> any comments are appreciated :-)


End file.
